I thought I would put on paper the journey that brought me to my present view of the aether.
F6 previously said I think he will agree that the force on a charge is a physical reality since we can measure it.
This way of thinking is the main cause of misunderstanding: believing that the measurement would be the indicator of a precise physical object.
A measurement evaluates effects that are obviously physical. But a measurement does not validate as an independent physical object the mathematical choices made to describe it, like the electric field.
This misunderstanding is a confusion between the map and the territory.
One can define the gravitational field as Newton did, or as Einstein did. But a Newtonian gravitational field is not a curvature of Einstein's spacetime, although to some degree of accuracy they both verify the measurement.
So we cannot say what is the "physical reality" behind the mathematical objects that describe it (assuming it exists and is independent of the observer). An object like the "gravitational field" remains a mathematical object, not a physical object. Again, science describes what is observed, not what exists independently of the observation.
The worst thing is that many people who confuse the map and the territory, create an imaginary territory from the map of conventional science, then want to redefine the scientists' map, claiming that the scientists are wrong, that the electron or the electric field is not this or not that, as if they were absolute realities... This is totally meaningless.
Having said that, physics is obviously not complete, so we can be interested as you did (and I did too), in Sciama or Mach. The problem is that we are not the only ones, scientists do the same thing and are as curious as we are, maybe even more. If most of these respectable scientists like Sciama or Mach did not have their theories accepted by their peers, it is because they were incompatible with some of our observations, especially Mach.
When we question a scientific theory, it is not enough to explore only part of what the alternative theory would explain, but also to explain everything that would remain unexplained when we disqualify the questioned theory.
If Maxwell's equations are claimed to be false, then relativity is also false, both being fully compatible, and everything they explained is also to be explained by the replacement theory.
What cannot be taken away from science is a great internal coherence, of which the rare exceptions are known and studied, such as the incompatibility between QM and GR, dark matter...
My opinion is that it would be much better to demonstrate experimentally new or unexplained effects before trying to replace proven physical theories. If there is nothing new to see, there is no new theory to make. One can have the idea of a new theory, like the ether, to imagine new effects that could be experimented, but then I urge amateur theorists to do as Einstein did: formalize it, with proposals for experiments demonstrating it, before talking about it.
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Topic: The Aether and science (Read 17527 times)
